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Old 20th July 2010
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by realitykid View Post
Better as in what BSD can do better than Linux or what BSD can do that Linux can't.
Linux can do everything any operating system in existence can do, not just BSDs. That is the major problem with the Linux. Usually if you think you are good for everything you are good for nothing. On the more serious note I would not try to waist my time using BSDs for instance for things like high performance computer clusters. At the same time OpenBSD is by all measure the best network appliance OS you can get. NetBSD niche is probably embedded systems even though OpenBSD is equal good. When it comes to file-system performance NetBSD rules. DragonFly is not mature project yet but one day hopefully will be the OS for clusters. FreeBSD looks a bit to me as a Linux of FreeBSD world. It is the most popular and the one I personally like the least.





Quote:
Originally Posted by realitykid View Post
1) How friendly is BSD? I've heard some stories of it actually getting more and more friendly, specifically with the PC-BSD install process.
It looks to me that your notion of friendliness is diametrically opposite of what most BSD people consider friendly. Based on that BSD is not for you.


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Originally Posted by realitykid View Post
2) Does BSD interact well with most hardware? As in detecting it, having working drivers for it out of the box (or user installable drivers). I'm talking about stuff like video and audio specifically. But even wireless, which leads me to my next question.
Linux driver layer SUCKS big time. That is why you have Ubuntu supporting a peace of hardware in one release just to have problems with another release. Solaris common driver API is an example of how drivers should interact with the kernel. BSDs do support most open hardware. I dare to claim that in terms of Network OpenBSD supports far more hardware than Linux. On another hand if you are looking for proprietary binary blob drivers for BSDs you will not find any for most part (with some exception of FreeBSD).

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Originally Posted by realitykid View Post
3) Does BSD do well with wireless connections? I'm not talking specifically PCI wireless cards, but also USB adapters (such as mine).
Yes!!! At least OpenBSD which is my OS of choice.

Quote:
Originally Posted by realitykid View Post
4) Last, but certainly not least, does BSD usually have good community support? Now this is a big one for me. I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot pole, let alone use it, if the Linux based operating system that I want to use doesn't have a good community.
I think again that yours and mine perception of good community are diametrically opposite. BSD has fantastic community consisting of very competent people with many years of professional experience. Many of this people haven't known anything else except Unix whole their lives. On another hand the life is too short to help every idiot who doesn't want to read the documentation. I have seen a "good Ubuntu community". A trivial poorly researched question is immediately answered by two dozen of completely incompetent users who have no clue what they are talking about. No, we do not have nor we need such communities.
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